muse-ings

Tonight I decided not to watch TV. At all.
Instead, I went out to Pine Lake and took a canoe across the lake and swam, all by myself, just before the sun went down. The air was moist and all the smells were green and brown and growing. I paddled out into the middle of the lake and sat for a long time, just thinking, just letting the canoe drift.
And then I came home and watered my plants and made some tea.
And darned some slippers and cleaned the living room and trimmed the cactus in the kitchen window, and moved the avocado tree into my bedroom, and went through some photographs, and weeded some DVDs out of my collection and put them in the box to go to the Salvation Army.
And then I hooked up the record player that my friend Mark gave me a couple of weeks ago, and I listened to a bunch of music. The Barn Dance record, and Peer Gynt.

I ended with Bach’s Air from Suite No. 3 in D (for orchestra), which is one of my all-time favorite pieces.

And here’s the point of this whole ramble – I’d really like to paint that music. I know that anything I’d attempt, for real, would be far inferior to how I imagine it in my head. But the [Bach] piece is so visual – so many different strands of tone, all winding around each other, intertwining like the branches of a vine; a perfect vine. A vine that’s been filmed by National Geographic and is being played back at a high speed so you can see it stretching and unfurling as if it were some strange animal. And then sometimes one strand, that’s been growing and turning with the rest, suddenly reaches for the sunlight and outruns its companions. For a minute it stands alone, brilliant, and then the others find it again and it falls behind and lets another run forward.

I still don’t understand how something so mathematical – just these frequencies of sound, scheduled specifically to meet or miss each other over the span of a period of time – can be at the same time so organic, completely uncontrolled, passionate, and able to touch us so deeply.

Music is kick-ass.

[But I suppose all of life is that way – it’s simultaneously art and chemistry, molecules and beauty, math and passion – all made up of the same stuff. Which is one reason I’ve never understood why they separate the different disciplines in school. Biology is Painting is Literature is Music.]